A Semiotic Perspective on Pragmatic Web

When?

Wednesday 6 February 2008, 14:00 to 15:00

Where?

39BB02

Open to:

Students, Staff

Web technology has been bringing great benefits to social, economic and other aspects of our life. The web, presented to us as the system of systems of information, allows us to enjoy rich information from multiple sources and to work together across spatial and temporal differences. Recently the emergence of semantic web has aimed to enhance the effectiveness of human communication, by assigning information well-defined meaning. One of the key mechanisms in semantic web is to embed information into a meta-structure (expressed in e.g. XML) to preserve semantics. Researchers (De Moor et al. 2005) have characterised such evolution as from a Syntactic Web to a Semantic Web, and further proposed a concept of Pragmatic Web.

Peircian semiotics stresses the interplay between syntactics, semantics and pragmatics; and advocates that human “information-processing” is by virtual a semiosis. Organisational Semiotics places great emphasis on studying the effect of using information in social and business contexts. Information retrieval by matching every concept with an URI, as it is featured in semantic web, can only be part of information-processing; and effective use of information in business applications has to rely on pragmatic aspect of information. In our work, we propose a Pragmatic Frame for information representation, which consist of a number of essential elements such as: agents, purposes, communicative acts, roles, norms and responsibilities. One of the promising areas of application is that Pragmatic Frame can be used in connection to service oriented architecture for the development of quality information systems.

Notes:

Dr. Kecheng Liu (http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~sis01kl/), Fellow of British Computer Society, is a full professor and holds a chair of Informatics and e-Business, and is Director of Informatics Research Centre (www.irc.rdg.ac.uk), University of Reading, UK. He has published over one hundred papers in journals and conferences, and serves in editorial boards of several journals. He has chaired conferences, wrote 1 and edited 5 books in the field of informatics and organisational semiotics. He has been responsible for several research projects, including as principal investigator for £1M from the British Research Council EPSRC and a similar amount from European Union and the British Department of Trade and Industry. The research projects include semiotic methods for systems integration, autonomic computing and self-evolving systems, agents for personalisation in intelligent buildings, pervasive intelligent working spaces, intelligent system for through-life performance of building services, and legacy systems migration and web-based CRM. He is Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Dalian University of Technology and the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Science, all in China. He has been invited to deliver lectures in information systems and semiotics in Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Czech, France, Hong Kong, Portugal, Sweden, The Netherlands and United States